The present disclosure generally relates to the field of electronics. More particularly, an embodiment of the invention relates to techniques for controlling flow after occurrence of architectural events at high privilege levels in a processor.
Various mechanisms may be used to change the flow of control (such as the processing path or instruction sequence being followed) in a processor. For example, an interrupt may be used to change the flow of control in a processor. Generally, an interrupt may be triggered by an external interrupt signal provided to a processor. The processor may respond to the interrupt by jumping to an interrupt handler routine. In some cases, interrupts may be masked by the operating system executing at a supervisor privilege level, such that a software program executing at a relatively lower privilege level than the operating system may have no opportunity to modify such control flow changing events without modifying the operating system (OS).